Sperm Donors, Egg Donors or Gamete Donors?

Recently there has been a lot of conversation on the blog about anonymous donors.   Sometimes it’s clear that people have meant to use the term inclusively, to cover both egg donors and sperm donors.   But sometimes it seems to have been more specifically about sperm donors, as when sperm donors were compared with ”deadbeat dads.”  

It seems to me that in some respects whatever concerns there are about anonymous donors should be the same for sperm donors and egg donors.   In essence, they donate the same thing–genetic material necessary to create a child.   To the extent it seems like a problem, in both cases a child might not be able to trace back his or her genetic lineage.     

Despite this similarity, the conversation tended to focus fairly specifically on sperm donors from time to time, while it never migrated specifically to egg donors.

Surrogacy (Again) in the NYT–Talking to the Children

Once again there is a story in the NYT about surrogacy.   This one is about how people who have used surrogacy talk to their children about the children’s conception and birth.    There’s many things I’d like to say about this one, though if I’m not sure they will all fit together into some grand point. 

First off, the story includes some statistics I find astonishing.   It reports that according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine–the relevant medical special organization–there were between 400 and 600 birth a year resulting from gestational surrogacy.  (This is surrogacy where the woman who gives birth is not genetically related to the child.  Instead, the egg comes either from one of the intending parents or a donor.)   Now that is a tiny number.     If you poke around the web or this blog you can find some data on the number of live births in the US per year.  From this study it looks to me to be around 4 million births per year.  

Now these numbers are disputed even within the article and I will accept that they are low.   (I will note, though, that I am a bit skeptical of the statistics reported by someone whose income is dependent on the business of promoting surrogacy arrangements.   They might have an interest in erring on the high side.) 

Counting Unmarried Mothers

It’s a quiet day so I want to go back and pick up a story from last week’s papers.   I’ve linked to a story from the Washington Post, though you can find the original study from the National Center for Health Statistics here.

Now I’ve written about this topic before.   From my point of view, there are two things worthy of comment–the actual information in the report and the media coverage of that information.  (It seems to me this report is a close cousin to the report that sparked the last round of media attention.)

If you look at the study, you’ll see that the nearly 40% of children born in 2007 were born to unmarried women.  There’s a notable correlation between age of the mother and marital status.  Thus, 86% of the births to teenagers were non-marital births while 60% of the births to women 20-24.  Once women are more than 24 years old, the percentage of non-marital births drops substantially.

But you can also look at this another way:   While the rate of unmarried births for women over 30 is smaller–1 in 5 births, which is 20%–it rose from 1 in 7 births (about 14%) in 2002.   That’s a substantial increase.   Indeed, there a nice little pie chart that will shows you the shifting ages of non-marital mother.   It’s no longer fair to equate “unmarried mother” with “teen-age mother.”   

Odds and Ends

I’ve got a three little notes to myself I’ve been meaning to cover here.  I think I’ll just lump them together, though they are not necessarily related.   Just things that might be of interest.

–There’s a new book out called Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman.   I have not read the book yet (though I hope t0) but Terry Gross did a very thought-provoking interview with Waldman on Fresh Air.  It’s that interview I want to recommend.   There’s a discussion of abortion, in part about the language of abortion and generational shift, that I’m still mulling over.  If you go and look soon you can still download the podcast, I think.

–Also from the radio, but on a different note, this past Saturday Weekend Edition had a little Mother’s Day essay by Alice Furlaud.   She includes discussion of the rescue of three stranded dolphins in Wellfleet,

Gendered Parenthood On Mother’s Day

It’s Mother’s Day today.   A tribute to mothers, and a monument to gendered parenting.  Which is not to say I’m against Mother’s Day, per se, and I’m certainly not against mothers.  But still, I’ll take a few moments to reflect on how very deeply gendered parenting is.

Two separate days, separated by several weeks, are marked out for male parents and for female parents.   Today is the day we celebrate female parents.  They might be single mothers, or lesbian mothers, or conventional-no-modifier-needed mothers.   They might be the household wage-earner or an equal partner in the wage earning.   They might be the household disciplinarian.   They might be genetically related to their children, or have adopted their children, or have given birth to them, or have no recognized legal relationship.

These are not distinctions we make today.   If you are female and you are a parent, then you are a mother and this is your day.   (And now, if I had footnotes to work with, I’d drop a footnote that said something about our blithe confidence that we know what “female” actually means.)  Even the most maternal man doesn’t get honored today.  He waits for Father’s Day.  

The Nature of Gender

Part of the reason I invested the time in writing yesterday’s post, which was rather less connected to my topic than might be usual, was to set up today’s post.   And now I find I can also tie it to the Modern Love column in today’s New York Times.   It’s a lovely column by Jennifer Finney Boylan about her experience of being Maddy.  (Or is it being a Maddy?)

Boylan is transgendered.  She began as her children’s father but, during the course of their childhood, transitioned to female.   It’s her older son who christened her “Maddy” when it became clear to him that continuing to call her “daddy” was going to be absurd.

Part of what Boylan writes about, of course, is gender.  What I want to think about here is gender and parenting.

That’s hardly a new topic for me.     It’s also a topic of particular concern for lesbian mothers and gay fathers and their advocates, as well as for single parents.  That’s because lesbian, gay and single parents are subject to the criticism that their kids won’t/don’t have a mother and a father.  

Lesbian Mothers, Litigation, and Doing the Right Thing

Over the last year I’ve blogged about any number of cases like this one from New York. These are cases where, in the course of a struggle over the child, one woman asserts that the other is not a parent to the child.  As a legal strategy, this is a powerful argument.   If you are a parent and your adversary is not, you will almost always win the case.   (I’ve discussed this feature of legal parenthood before.)

I find these cases and the frequency with which they arise quite distressing.   (They are also, as I noted here,  a phenomenon primarily associated with lesbian (as opposed to gay) parenting.)  It isn’t simply that lesbians argue over child custody cases.  That is probably just a regrettably human trait.   It is the nature and implications of the particular arguments that are offered in some cases.   To the extent the arguments offered undermine lesbian parents generally, the conduct of the litigation is, in my view, extremely problematic.  It is doing the wrong, rather than the right thing.

It is one thing to argue that I am a better parent than you are, and that the child would be better off spending more time with me than with you.  That is particular to the facts a specific case and doesn’t undermine lesbian/gay parenthood generally.   It is quite different to assert that you are no more than a legal stranger to the child and that, as such,  you have no rights to any contact at all, particularly if the heart of your argument is that you cannot be a parent because you did not give birth, or you did not adopt, or you are not genetically related to the child, or we are not married, or a child gets only one mother.    These arguments undermine the status of all lesbian and gay families.  

Gay Fathers/Lesbian Mothers, III

I’m not sure where or how far I want to take this thread for now.   The last couple of posts seem unsatisfying to me–they aren’t clear enough and they lack direction.  Perhaps all I am ready to do at this moment is not that there are both commonalities and differences between lesbian mothers and gay fathers.

I’ve a bunch of other topics queued up for now anyway, so let me just add one more thought here before I move off for now.  This is really the thought that triggered me to write about this topic now, so I might as well at least flag it.

A few posts back you’ll find an entry about some good news from New York state.  It’s a note about a case in which one woman donated an egg which was then combined with donor sperm. The resulting embryo was then transferred to the other woman who brought the pregnancy to term and gave birth.  As is discussed in that post, under the relevant law (there New York law) the second woman is a mother by virtue of having given birth.  The first women has a number of theories under which she might claim motherhood, but in the case is allowed to adopt her the child (a second parent adoption) in order to ensure portable parental rights.

What the women did here is a fairly elaborate procedure, and it bears some resemblance to several different forms of ART discussed.   So, for example, you could look at the first woman as an egg donor and/or you could look at the second woman as a gestational surrogate (a woman pregnant with and giving birth to a child she is not genetically related to).   But that’s not what the women involved intend to be, for neither egg donors nor gestational surrogates generally intend to be mothers.    (Indeed, there’s a well known CA case, KM v. EG, where the lower courts treated the first woman as an egg donor who therefore had no parental rights.  This result was reversed on appeal.)

Gay Fathers/Lesbian Mothers, II

I want to develop yesterday’s post a bit further here.   You can read that to get up to speed.

My basic point is that while gay fathers and lesbian mothers have much in common–for example, both are targeted by anti-gay/lesbian organizations for failing to provide male and female gender role models–there are also significant differences between them.  I think I began to jumble some of the differences in the last post.  That isn’t helpful so let me slow down and try to sort things out a bit more carefully.

First its worth observing that there are different kinds of differences.   Some seem to me to flow pretty clearly from biology (I’ll call that “category 1″), others are differences that may or may not flow from biology but seem primarily tied to the mother/father social role distinction (category 2), and still others are differences in behavior which I observe but for which I do not have any explanation (category 3).

So for example, one difference I discussed yesterday was that the cases I’ve blogged about in which one person challenges her  ex-partner’s entitlement to claim to be a parent all seem to involve lesbians rather than gay men–that’s category 3.    A second difference discussed yesterday–that to have kids lesbians need to obtain sperm while gay men need something more expensive and complicated (like a surrogate)–that’s category 1.   These categories might be useful in thinking about what the possible importance of these differences are.  

The Varieties of Motherhood

The post about the women in West Virginia makes me think about the varieties of motherhood.    The law draws all sorts of fine distinctions.    Some of the time they match up with reality and some of the time they don’t.  And in our more common conversations we also draw fine distinctions.

So the women in the West Virginia case are, legally speaking, foster mothers.   They are prevented by operation of law from becoming adoptive mothers, because only married couples can adopt and they cannot marry.    Some people also probably would call them co-mothers (or co-parents) and, of course, lesbian parents.    Some of these categories are not legal ones, they’re just terms we use to identify ourselves and the groups we relate to.   But other categories have legal meaning.

Crucially, adoptive parents are legal parents.  Foster parents are not full legal parents.